VR Training

Sense Arena Secures $3M to Expand Ice Hockey VR Training Tools, Add New Sports

May 19, 2022 From roadtovr

VR ice hockey training company Sense Arena announced that it’s closed a $3 million investment round, something the startup says will be used to support continued development on its ice hockey training platform as well as expand to new sports.

The funding round was led by J&T Ventures, and includes previous backers Miton and SYNER. According to Crunchbase, this brings the company’s overall outside investment to just over $5 million.

Founded in 2017, the Prague-based company has already become the official VR training provider for a number of NHL teams, including the Arizona Coyotes, Las Vegas Golden Knights, Los Angeles Kings, and New Jersey Devils. Sense Arena counts 30 professional hockey teams, and nine NCAA programs (including Harvard, Northeastern, and Quinnipiac) and 40 individual NHL players and youth hockey organizations from around the world.

The company says its platform, which launched in 2018, is engineered to “enhance read-and-react skills and cognitive performance for both skaters and goalies” in combination with Meta Quest and standard hockey equipment. Sense Arena says it provides performance feedback and recommendations, allowing athletes to make adjustments and advancements in real time.

Check out a short explanation of what a coaching session looks like with some in-app footage, presented by Brian Daccord, Sense Arena’s Director of Goaltending Development and former NHL goaltending coach and scout.

“Some of the top hockey players currently training with Sense Arena include Philipp Grubauer of the Seattle Kraken, Dawson Mercer of the New Jersey Devils, and Northeastern University’s Devon Levi, who earned the 2022 Mike Richter Award given to the top goaltender in NCAA Division I men’s ice hockey,” the company says in a press statement.

“Sense Arena has developed cutting-edge virtual reality training to help athletes maximize their potential and we feel supremely confident in Bob’s vision for the future of sports training,” said Martin Kešner, co-founder of J&T Ventures. “We believe that Sense Arena has only scratched the surface of its potential. We are excited to help them elevate their technology and increase its application around the sports world.”

To date, the company has shipped over 2,500 installations of Sense Arena across 40 countries. You can check out the range of gear and requirements over at the Sense Arena Store for more.

This Bizarre VR Gas Mask Makes Breathing In VR More Difficult

May 13, 2022 From vrscout

The AirRes Mask can be used to simulate a variety of stressful and high-risk scenarios.

A research team working out of the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences in Austria has developed a unique accessory for the Meta Quest 2 VR headset that allows users to interact with the virtual world by simply breathing. The bizarre-looking peripheral can also be used to hinder the user’s breathing in order to simulate “adverse” environmental conditions, such as smoke caused by fire.

The AirRes Mask, as it’s referred to by the team, is composed of a standard half-face respirator equipped with a sensor and resistance disk. The device works by measuring the user’s breathing, allowing them to engage with the virtual world in a variety of unique ways.

In a video provided by the team, we catch a glimpse of the device being used to play the harmonica. Depending on the position of the virtual instrument and the force of the breathing, the user is able to trigger different notes. Later on, we see the user operating a virtual blowgun and blowing up balloons by carefully breathing into the apparatus.

As previously mentioned, the AirRes Mask can also be used to simulate breathing resistance in VR, allowing developers to safely immerse user’s in a variety of harsh environments. This is demonstrated with a firefighter simulator in which the user battles a raging inferno from within a confined space.

As the smoke begins to fill the room, the resistance disk restricts airflow through the mask to simulate smoke inhalation and a decrease in stamina. According to the research team, hindering a user’s breathing can increase their stress levels, further immersing the user in a variety of high-risk scenarios.

“Breathing resistance can provide feedback for simple actions such as blowing into wind instruments, or for more complex contextual information about environmental conditions or the state of the user’s virtual avatar,” said the research team in their full research paper.

“For instance, effects of virtual smoke or low stamina of the avatar can be expressed by the system as an increase in breathing resistance. We explore such action-based and context-based mappings of breathing interaction in a user study and investigate the system’s ability to precisely map a user’s breathing force to actions as well as its ability to provide noticeable variations in breathing resistance.”

We’ve seen our fair share of bizarre multi-sensory technology in the past, from a haptic feedback device that utilizes ultrasonic transducers to simulate the feeling of spiders crawling on your face to a location-based experience that lets you smell the inside of a tree. The AirRes Mask offers yet another way for developers to immerse VR users in their experiences via multi-sensory technology.

In addition to entertainment, the device could prove immensely useful for training purposes. The technology offers companies and organizations a way to efficiently simulate stressful and even potentially dangerous scenarios without risk to the trainee.

For more information on the project, read the team’s full research paper, AirRes Mask: A Precise and Robust Virtual Reality Breathing Interface Utilizing Breathing Resistance as Output Modality.

Image Credit: Salzburg University of Applied Sciences

Surgery Training Platform ‘Osso VR’ Secures $66M Series C Financing

March 24, 2022 From roadtovr

Osso VR, the VR surgical training platform, today announced it’s closed a $66 million Series C financing round, something the company says will be used to broaden its VR surgical offering and hire more expert talent.

The Series C round was led by Oak HC/FT, which includes participation from Signalfire, GSR Ventures, Tiger Global Management and Kaiser Permanente Ventures.

This brings the company’s lifetime outside investment to around $109 million, with its $27 million Series B arriving in July 2021.

Founded in late 2016 by UCLA and Harvard-trained orthopedic surgeon Justin Barad, MD, Osso VR’s surgical training tech provides on-demand, educational experiences to surgeons with a focus on acquainting them with emerging techniques and technologies. The company works with industry leaders such as Johnson & Johnson, Stryker, Zimmer Biomet and Smith & Nephew.

More recently, Osso VR made strides during the COVID-19 pandemic since its VR training allows medical professionals to learn and practice from a distance. It provides modules across a number of fields, including orthopedics, endoscopy, and a host of interventional procedures.

The company has now grown to more than 150 employees, and Osso VR says it plans to grow “exponentially” over the next year.

“The future at Osso VR is incredibly bright. Each step of the way, we’ve stayed true to our mission to democratize healthcare and seen the results that our platform brings to surgical training and assessment,” said Barad. “This round of investment supports the next step of our journey to provide access to all healthcare professionals. I couldn’t be more excited to take this next step with such a talented, passionate team.”